From Out of the Ice by Marc Adamus

From Out of the Ice by Marc Adamus

Mile after mile of frozen clear ice on these lakes in the Far North of the Yukon. We helicoptered in here for over a week this last October and took away from it some of the best foregrounds I had ever seen. In places, the ice bubbles were as amazing as anything in the Rockies. Ice cracks looked like Lake Bikal, not the Yukon. This we found everywhere we went, and we had some amazing skies to work with each night. For this feature, showing off the clear cracks about 1ft thick, I set up at twilight and recorded the entire foreground with a focus stack at f/16 in 4 shots, starting about 7cm away from the lens. I finished that stack with infinity focus and then proceeded to wait for the aurora, which luckily came on very quickly that night and didn’t move around a lot for the first hour or so, enabling me to capture another focus stack at ISO 6400, f/4 and 30 seconds each plus an f/2.8 exposure at 8 seconds for the aurora sky. When you do a stack at f/4 though, it isn’t possible to stack anything closer than about 20cm because the plane of focus is so shallow, so the foreground here is a blend of the aurora/reflection which was really in the each of my 9 more stacks at f/4, but inside 20cm, the most immediate of foregrounds, those icy details were part of the f/16 stack at twilight. The f/4 stack and f/11 were joined manually, as always, through careful overlays and alignments using darker and lower detail areas to hide any misalignments. Sounds like it was a lot of work in post, but actually when you do this kind of stacking/blending regularly it’s just a matter of thinking it through in the field and making sure you come back with the right exposures, then another 20-30 minutes in post.

Marc Adamus: Photos